So it was a surprise, to say the least, when a military public-affairs officer e-mailed me, a full seven months later, saying she'd been cleared, finally, to provide them. I was played snippets, but told my chances of hearing the full recordings were nonexistent. ![]() Last September, as part of my research for the film United 93, on which I was an associate producer, I requested copies from the Pentagon. Subpoenaed by the commission during its investigation, the recordings have never been played publicly beyond a handful of sound bites presented during the commission's hearings. "The real story is actually better than the one we told," a norad general admitted to 9/11-commission staffers when confronted with evidence from the tapes that contradicted his original testimony. It is the fog and friction of war live-the authentic military history of 9/11. ![]() ![]() Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. A mix of staccato bursts of military code urgent, overlapping voices the tense crackle of radio traffic from fighter pilots in the air commanders' orders piercing through a mounting din and candid moments of emotion as the breadth of the attacks becomes clearer.įor the neads crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings-some real, some phantom-that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. The recordings are fascinating and chilling. neads's mission remained in place and continues today: its officers, air-traffic controllers, and air-surveillance and communications technicians-mostly American, with a handful of Canadian troops-are responsible for protecting a half-million-square-mile chunk of American airspace stretching from the East Coast to Tennessee, up through the Dakotas to the Canadian border, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Neads is a desolate place, the sole orphan left behind after the dismantling of what was once one of the country's busiest bomber bases-Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, which was otherwise mothballed in the mid-90s. The battle commander, Colonel Bob Marr, had promised to bring in fritters. ![]() Rather, Nasypany (pronounced Nah-sip-a-nee), an amiable commander with a thick mini-mustache and a hockey player's build, was headed in early to get ready for the norad-wide training exercise he'd helped design. As he poured his first coffee on that sunny September morning, the odds that he would have to defend against Russian "Bear Bombers," one of norad's traditional simulated missions, were slim. The Northeast Air Defense Sector (neads), where Nasypany had been stationed since 1994, is the regional headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (norad), the Cold War–era military organization charged with protecting North American airspace. Air Force officers stationed there, a big, sideways, half-buried beer keg.Īs Major Kevin Nasypany, the facility's mission-crew commander, drove up the hill to work on the morning of 9/11, he was dressed in his flight suit and prepared for battle. It could pass for the Jetsons' garage or, in the estimation of one of the higher-ranking U.S. Tucked in a piney notch in the gentle folds of the Adirondacks' southern skirts-just up from a derelict Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern rail spur-is a 22-year-old aluminum bunker tricked out with antennae tilted skyward.
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